The late Clyde Leopold Walcott was born on 17 January 1926 in New Orleans, Bridgetown, St. Michael, Barbados. He was educated at Combermere School and then Harrison College from the age of fourteen, where he began wicket-keeping and improved his bowling, especially his inswingers.
This prodigious young man played his first first-class cricket match for Barbados in 1942, aged sixteen, as a schoolboy. He made his debut in February 1946, scoring 314 not out against Trinidad on a matting wicket. Alongside his school friend Frank Worrell, who scored 255 not out, they shared an unbroken partnership of 574 for the fourth wicket. This set a world record for any partnership in first-class cricket, which still stands in the West Indies.
Cricket Career
He was the West Indies chairman of selectors between 1973 and 1988 (word on the street is they were quite good back then) and manager of the West Indies teams that won the 1975 and ’79 World Cups. Between 1988 and ’93, he was president of the West Indies Cricket Board. In 1993, he became the first black (and non-English-speaking) chairman of the ICC, also serving as a match referee. Having been knighted in 1994, he then became ICC cricket chairman in 1997, managing its Code of Conduct. A giant of the game.
That high Test-batting watermark of 938 came in June 1955. Twelve months earlier, he had been playing for Enfield in the Lancashire League in England, his fourth season at Dill Hill Lane, honouring his contract there before taking up the post in what was soon to become Guyana.
He had been signed by Enfield during the West Indies’ 1950 tour, arriving by boat for the 1951 season with his great friend Weekes and their wives, Muriel and Joy. Meanwhile, Frank Worrell was heading back to Radcliffe in the Central Lancashire League, the three of them meeting up regularly – sometimes for a fish supper in the chip shop in Clayton-le-Moors, where the Walcott’s lived in digs, and sometimes at Worrell’s house, where the three of them could escape the goldfish bowl of local interest and its constant impromptu chinwags (for Walcott, this was often when he headed out to use the phone box down the street, his lodgings not having this facility).
Walcott’s debut season started with scores of 1, 125, 0, 0 – the last two a pair against Dattu Phadkar’s Nelson – yet ultimately yielded 1,137 runs at 71.06 (Weekes managed 1,518 at just under 90). Having finished bottom (14th) in 1950, Enfield improved to eighth. The Worsley Cup brought scores of 120* and 110, but also a second-round exit. A strong first campaign.
The winter took Muriel home to Barbados and Walcott to Australia and New Zealand, with mixed results, and on his return in 1952, the couple stayed with Vera Simmons, the sister of Enfield’s future Lancashire legend Jack. He practised four nights a week – offering the 11-year-old Jack hours of private coaching and taking him in his Hillman Minx out on Sunday jollies on the benefit circuit, in one of them launching a six into the local brass band’s euphonium – and after nets would wander up to see Jack’s parents for tea. With regular collections topping up his earnings, he often treated them to a slap-up feed at the Lobster Pot in Blackpool.
Walcott was unable to breach the 1,000-run mark in 1952, managing 955 – his best the 105* he took off Lindwall’s Nelson – although he did improve his average to 79.58 as Enfield moved up a spot to seventh. The Worsley Cup brought another second-round exit, this time to Bruce Dooland’s double-winning East Lancs side. Walcott did chip in 191 to that two-wicket defeat, mind.
The close-season took Walcott home to Barbados, where a five-Test series against India yielded a 1-0 win and a batting average of seventy-six, a prelude to one of the great hot streaks in Lancashire League history. The big man began the 1953 season with scores of 56*, 104*, 126*, 40, 81*, 99* (the skipper declaring, nine down, to deny the opposition a bowling point and his pro a hefty collection), 46*, 27* and 56*, giving him an average of 635 as he headed into the game at Burnley, where he improved that to 670 before falling to Cec Pepper. Not even the mighty Weekes managed anything so outlandish.
That average had fallen to 101.54 by the end of the season, a Lancashire League record and the first time anyone had averaged three figures in a season. The record lasted for 12 months, during which Weekes averaged 158 for Bacup.
Still, Enfield had improved to fifth and were also swept into the first Worsley Cup final in the club’s history by Walcott’s 85* and 8/27 in the semi-final victory over Church. The final was played on a baking hot day at Dill Hall Lane in front of a heaving crowd, Burnley recovering from 95/6 to 132/7 when, as per the curious local regulations, their innings was suspended. The top scorer was the Guyana-born future Somerset player Peter Wight, who was studying in Lancashire.
In the second over of Enfield’s reply, opener Arnold Topham miscued a pull shot off Bernard Lavin, bringing Walcott in at 1/1. The Bajan had been on his sick bed all week and was almost run out from his first ball, pushed to mid-off, although an overthrow got him back on strike. A couple of balls later, he was caught at slip by Pepper, chasing a wide one. Enfield subsided to sixty all out.
After that disappointment, Clyde signed off with disappointing scores of 11, 33, 25 and finally fifty-five against champions Haslingden, falling to Vinoo Mankad’s left-arm spin. The winter assignment brought Len Hutton’s England to the Caribbean for a fractious and controversial tour played out against a backdrop of agitation for self-rule and covered in depth in David Woolhouse’s magisterial ‘Who Only Cricket Know.’ Walcott, twenty-seven and approaching his peak, rattled off 698 runs at 87.25, albeit with the tourists coming from 2-0 down after three to draw 2-2, Hutton averaging 96.71.
It was perhaps inevitable that Walcott should suffer a Lancashire League lull after such highs, and while 783 runs at 55.92 was a drop-off, it still left him third in the 1954 averages. Moreover, Enfield finished second. A major part of this was due to Walcott’s improved bowling. A man who had kept wicket in his first 15 Tests had by then learnt how to bowl accurate medium-pace cutters, and a bowling average that had been 19.5 in his first year, then 16.1 and 13.6, tumbled to 8.48. His seventy-two wickets – including a best of 9/34 – were the fourth most in the league.
It was a solid way to say farewell after four fruitful years – a Lancashire League career that brought him 3,992 runs at 75.32 (it was 109 in the cup), the fourth highest average in the competition’s history.
Back home, a five-match series against Australia the following spring brought Walcott another 827 runs at 82.7 – this including five hundreds, two in Trinidad and two more in Jamaica, regarded by the ESPNcricinfo boffins as the second best batting series of all time – and with it that stellar rating of 938. He was an Enfield legend, and he was, at that moment in time, the best player in the world.
Politically, he was a transitional figure, taking the organisation calmly and emolliently from under the wing of MCC before it was taken over by leaders less wedded to traditional Anglophilia. Already an OBE, he was knighted in 1993 for services to cricket. He also received the Golden Arrow of Achievement from Guyana and a Gold Crown of Merit for his immense contribution to cricket in the West Indies.
Credits; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESPNcricinfo
